I am researching philosophy and EA ideas after a career in finance and real estate. See my website http://jamesaitchison.co.uk
James Aitchison
Karma: 167
A brilliant article, thank you. My highlight: We are part of a ragtag team of people who try to care about everyone and everything that matters. We are the first true attempt at applied impartial good maximization.
A Problem with Motivation
Yes, it is harder to care for distant or statistical people even if it is normatively the right thing to do. We shouldn’t overestimate how much we can do by will power alone, but changing norms may be effective.
Thank you for introducing your site which I am finding very valuable. I am enjoying both your archive of articles and your most recent posts and have subscribed to your newsletter. Thank you also for utilitarianism.net which is great to have as a public resource.
A further addition to the EA quiver would be reading groups to discuss the best books related to EA. As with the Socrates Cafe, discussions could be structured around answering a central question.
I was struck by your paragraph ‘ A wildly successful EA movement could do as much good for the world as almost any other social movement in history. Even if the movement is only marginally successful, if the precepts underlying the movement are somewhat sound, the utility implications are enormous.’
I suspect if EA is to do massive good, this is more likely to come from developing and promoting ideas such as extinction risk reduction that come to be adopted politically, rather than from EA’s direct philanthropy. The biggest wins may come through political channels.
I agree with your arguments against focusing too much on longtermism.
Another advantage from global poverty and health projects is demonstrating clearly the multiplier effect of donations. The base case is a cash transfer to a person with one hundredth of the donor’s income, which should give a one hundred times boost to welfare. From this compelling starting point we can then proceed to argue why in expectation other projects may do even better. We can picture a range of projects from those with good evidence base but returns only a modest multiple above cash transfers (bed nets) to project which could produce higher returns but have limited evidence (charity start ups). Doners may want to fund along this continuum.
Thank you for this article, full of nuance.
I think what makes effective altruism unique is that it is trying without preconceptions to work out how to do the most good. Beneficentric people may help neighbours, or civic groups, or charities, or religions, or pressure groups, or political parties, but these different approaches are not ranked by effectiveness.
There have always have been some saints, but it is a new idea to try to be an impartial moral maximiser, working through an information-hungry social movement.
How much should you do ‘off your own bat‘ (to use the British cricket idiom)? Well, most value comes from people working in their roles, or from working with others to create change, but sometimes there are opportunities that would be missed without an individual going out on a limb.
I love this post, it is so engagingly written. And the links are great, and have opened up valuable new ideas and sources for me. I strongly recommend your list of further reading and. indeed, all the links you provide.
You and your sources make the case for a number of very valuable ideas including asking for help, using social media, writing blogs, taking action, taking risk. How far to pursue each of these will obviously depend on personality and circumstances and will be a matter of balance.
I love this post, it is so engagingly written. And the links are great, and have opened up valuable new ideas and sources for me. I strongly recommend your list of further reading and. indeed, all the links you provide.
You and your sources make the case for a number of very valuable ideas including asking for help, using social media, writing blogs, taking action, taking risk. How far to pursue each of these will obviously depend on personality and circumstances and will be a matter of balance.
Thank you for a super, clear, comprehensive and well-argued talk setting out your up to date understanding of the Easterlin paradox. Great to have the references which I have been checking out. I am pleased you went in to depth on scale shifts as I suspect that generational changes in what is meant by a good life is the biggest challenge to definitively concluding that economic growth does little for life satisfaction.
Worth adding that there is also a historic aspect to the Dedicate / Non-Dedicate distinction in that EA’s origins were in more of a totalising, thrifty, monkish, Dedicate approach and over time Non-Dedicates have become more significant.
Thank you for this fine post, full of important ideas. I particularly appreciate the effort taken to explain everything clearly and to provide useful references. For context, I recommend OP’s blogpost, the seminar and Alexander Berger’s comments on your post.
I very much support your aim of trying to formalise our ends. Your post shows how many deep and important issues arise when thinking about ends, even just for global health and welfare philanthropy. It is a rare ambition to set out fundamental objectives, so OP should be praised for putting together a usable framework, and being open to improving it.
You make a striking point that it may not be valuable to save the lives of unhappy people. I hope Alexander Berger is right that most of our beneficiaries have positive lives.
You reach the modest conclusion that OP should accommodate a diversity of views about ends. This may be sensible now, but perhaps our thinking about ends will progress and converge over time. We keep going!
Thank you for a valuable post and for the interesting links provided. I am sure you are right that much value comes from individuals pursuing their passion for EA in their own time.
My experience has been that the time available for independent intellectual or altruistic pursuits varies over a lifetime. When demands from children and career peak, it is hard, but I recommend keeping jotting down ideas, using commuting time for reading or listening and trying to stop work absorbing all your thinking capacity. Later, career changes or (as in my case) early retirement can provide slack and the opportunity to do more.
I have relished ‘The Will MacAskill Festival’ - this month’s blizzard of podcasts and articles promoting the book. You and your team should be congratulated on the consistently high quality of this extensive material, which has always been professional and informative and has often been inspiring. Up to 17 August I have found ten podcasts appearances and eleven articles which I have listed with links and my brief comments here. Well done and thank you!
Will MacAskill Media for WWOTF—Full List
A link to Toby Ord’s 2008 paper The Scourge: Moral Implications of Natural Embryo Loss.
I also found MacAskill’s discussion of ethics on the January 2018 80k podcast fascinating, so thank you for setting out the key extracts and for your analysis.
It is particularly useful to see Korsgaard’s argument against Parfit on personal identity put so clearly.
I strongly agree that metaethical starting points influence the choice of normative theories. A Kantian focus on individual agency is a possibility, to be considered with other ways of conceptualising practical reason and morality.
I was interested to see the suggestion that rational discussions of value are cut short by the is-ought gap. This has been an influential view but I have a different angle.
We should acknowledge that normative judgements have a different semantic nature from the factual. When we use normative words such as ‘ought’ and ‘good’ we make judgements relative to ends or other criteria. Factual judgements report on facts in the world, normative judgements report on relations between objects and criteria. Judgements of practical reason, of how we ought to act, are about our means and our ends.
But we can and do reason about both means and ends. Judgements of practical reason range from the certain ‘You ought to turn right to get to the station’ to the unknowable ‘Ought I to take this job for my long-run happiness?’ There are better and worse ends—welfare is clearly more important than grass-counting and there are strong arguments why welfare is a better end than national glory.
Among ends, happiness seems to have a special place. We are creatures with valenced experience and we are directly aware that our own enjoyment is good and our suffering is bad. Reason seems to require us to expand the circle to also consider the enjoyment and suffering of other creatures. If nothing else, extremes of enjoyment and suffering surely matter.